Stuart McHenry - My Internet World

The title might be a little misleading but you can read my points. Sometimes keeping up with the trends can get you in trouble or not provide the desired results. As far as search engine optimization goes trends are often turned into filters by the major search engines.

A few months ago I did some consulting work for a Southern California company looking to increase there web presence. More specifically they wanted to increase their Google rankings through search engine optimization. Over the past five years so much has changed in the techniques and methods used to get a website quality search engine traffic and companies haven’t stayed up with the trends or were caught in the trends.

This specific company has been paying Google Adwords $45,000 per month in advertising. (ouch) You can see why they wanted to rank very badly in the natural search results. A handful of good rankings with some decent keywords could bringing them more traffic and they could in return substantially reduce their advertising budget. This is the single reason why SEO is so powerful. Most people don’t click the advertising results on the Google search pages, at least not compared to the natural search results.

Some of the old techniques used that don’t work as well anymore:

Reciprocal Links
Sure, a few of these here and there are no big deal but this should be a small part of your link building campaign. About 3-6 years ago everyone traded links with anyone and the person that traded more than the others was the one that ranked higher. This lead to poor quality search engine results but worked great for SEO while it lasted.

Off Topic / Paid Links
Trust me it’s easy for the major search engines to detect 90% or more of the paid links. Things like sitewide links, footer links and links under a “sponsors” area are all signs. Companies buying these links are wasting their money and time. These links won’t count and can even harm your trust in the search engines.

The best links for increasing your rankings are natural looking links. These are the type of links that Google and other search engines count as votes towards your website. It helps to have great content that people *might* link to but the best SEO’s in the world will go out of their way to find the links that look natural. These are the type of links that will stand the test of time and will always help your website in some way via it direct traffic or increasing your site’s trust in the search engines.

My single biggest SEO tip is to not get caught up in the “current trends” and go out and find links that are natural looking. What is a natural link? You can visit a few web pages yourself and analyze the different links on the pages to see which ones look natural and which ones don’t.

For anyone that doesn’t know my daughter is 8 1/2 years old and has more dedication than most adults. She started swimming for a swim team a few cities up the road back in late September. It has now been four months since she missed a swim practice. Yep… practice is five days a week and she made the last 85+ consecutive practices.

We even told her a few months ago she could take the day off and go to Disneyland, she looked at my wife and I and said “but I cannot miss practice”. What kid doesn’t want to go to Disneyland for the day? Well, I’m going to tell you what type of kid.

My daughter is super competitive, the kind of kid you see racing every set in practice just so she can beat everyone in her group. The kind of kid that when she gets out of practice she asks her mother which kids cheated during practice. (pulling on lane lines) She has been moved up in the past few months several times into different swim groups, each time quickly moving towards the top of the group she moves too. I’m wouldn’t say my daughter is the fastest swimmer, because she is not. There are kids that have been swimming for 3-4 times as long but that’s not the point of this blog post.

At 8 years old she is so dedicated to her sport, such dedication that you rarely find in adults nowadays let alone an 8 year old. She has goals already set, she tells my wife and I she wants to go to JO’s (Junior Olympics) just like my wife did when she was young. I have no doubt within the next year or so she can reach that goal.

The US real estate market has been down for a while now with the turning point AUG 2007. Today when I was out I saw more real estate agent vehicles than I normally see on a Saturday. Are they getting desperate or are more people starting to buying homes again?

Some markets have stayed strong, the high end buyers looking for Beverly Hills or Palm Springs real estate are effected by the US mortgage mess. Most of these higher end buyers have significant amount of cash as a down payment and usually have outstanding credit scores. The area hot the hardest are the middle class and lower income areas. Most of these areas people got into the cheapest loan and are now paying high payments, if they can even make the payments.

Even though I see more real estate professionals out and about I still think we are in for another 6-8 months at least of dealing with declining sales and the mortgage mess. I wish I was wrong as numerous websites we own are in the real estate mortgage industry.

I hardly ever look at the Yahoo or MSN SERPS but today was checking out a few things and noticed how crappy MSN is. Last night I watched the popular American Idol show so I decided to go search for American Idol on the three major search engines. It turns out MSN has no clue on how to handle sub domains. 15 out of the top 20 search results for American Idol are sub domains for americanidol.com.

Sub domains are not separate websites they are just pages or different categories to a website. There is no reason for any search engine to show more than two per results page. You would think with all the money Microsoft has they would hire smart people to run their search division.

The ad says “Overcharged? Swith Host, Accurate Billing” too funny!

Yesterday DreamHost had overcharged customers to the tune of $7.5 Million dollars. Customers were overcharged between $100 to as much as $9,000 and today we found a great advertisement on Google Adwords.

Props to McKremie.com for this inovative advertisement. It doesn’t say it but you can read between the lines on how great of a company DreamHost is.

The McKremie Web Hosting ad goes to a page were refugees of DreamHost can get one free month of hosting by using a coupon code.

coupon code: refugee

This is a new an exciting SEO Company that is going to shake things up in the SEM world. I can see people signing up for the ” RAM Rotation Service” and the “Keyword Filtration Service” if they can afford the prices.

RAM Rotation Service
Did you know it’s important to rotate your RAM ever 20,000 hits? Most SEO’s (dumb asses) have no idea how important it is. Uber SEO Company knows that your RAM will start to show signs of wear spots and this could slow down the exceleration to the first page.

some of the methods are out there…

New logo! Nothing increass your search engine ranking like a new logo

there is even an Uber eBook for SEO….

In three simple to read pages you can learn as much about SEO as Jeremy Schoemaker knows. If we had a fourth page you might even get more knowledge than Andy Beard has.

As you read through the website be sure to look at the actual URL’s.

more info: http://www.uberseocompany.com/

This year Andrew and I went to Pubcon, this being my third year and Andrew’s first year. For anyone that has been to one of these industry conferences knows that it’s all about networking. Some of us just network in a fun way.

We got in on Monday and our rooms where at the Palms. Last year I stayed at the Venetian and I like it there except when you are drunk off your ass trying to find your way back to your suite is a pain. So the Palms wasn’t bad, the rooms aren’t great but I didn’t really spend that much time there anyway. Monday night we watched the crazy football game and played a little poker.

Tuesday we woke up early went over to the conference location and took in the keynote by Craig Newmark. Craig is an interesting person but not a very dynamic speaker, before he was done half the room had cleared out. After this we caught a few sessions about social media marketing then blew off the conference the rest of the day. We went and played poker for the afternoon and rested ourselves for a night of parties.

We meet up with Jeremy and Dave and hung out with the Rubicon people in their suite before going over to Pure Nightclub. Nicole and the people at Rubicon know how to put on a party. We were treated like VIP’s, there was a huge line outside the nightclub and we didn’t have to wait. Once inside we had a section set aside for us to hang out, drink and dance. By far the best private event at Pubcon 2007!

Wednesday we went to a few sessions and then… poker, drinking and more socializing. I meet some interesting people on Wednesday a few of the most interesting where Dick Masterson (this guys always on Dr. Phil) and the I Can Has Cheezburger? guys. The BOTW guys (Brian & Greg) of course were there and seemed to have their own craps game going on. I ended up going back to my room around 3:30 AM and it’s good I did. I heard that Dave had to give the cab driver some extra money when Andrew puked all over the cab ride back.

Thursday was chill… woke up did a few sessions then went and played more poker. That night we played in the Purpose Inc’s poker tournament. (some money went to charity) This was a fun event a few of my buddies did well, I was knocked out in # 17 place. After this a handful of us hung out at a club to the wee hours of the morning.

Since Christmas is almost here I still need a gift for my favorite (don’t tell the others) nephew. This is a good kid and has done well in school and stays out of trouble. I really wanted to get him something nice that he would appreciate. A few weeks back he was over my house and I heard him talking about how he needs a new cell. Something about the number “3″ wasn’t working that good and he had to press down really hard. So I thought, why not kids love cell phones and it’s something he could use everyday.

I know he has one of those T-mobile plans so I went in search for a t-mobile phone. I found one on the Internet that offered the Sidekick, Blackberry and all the other popular models. I called there customer service department to ensure I would receive it before the big holiday and they lady on the phone said I would get it in 2-3 business days. This was great news for me, no need to drive to a T-mobile store and waste my time. They even had a deal that saved me some money so I bought two cell phone accessories to go with the new phone.

My 8 year old daughter reminds me I’m getting. Last night we were watching the AMA Awards and Duran Duran started to play. BTW, my daughter is a huge music fan and can sing (word-for-word) just about any song on the music charts. So, when Duran Duran started singing she said she liked this song from this new band. She had been hearing it on Sirius satellite radio on the POP 1 channel. This is when I realized I was getting old.

I had to explain to her just because she never heard of Duran Duran before doesn’t make them a new band. I explained to her that Duran Duran has been around for more than 28 years. (yeah it’s been at least that long) I then dated myself when I told her I use to have them on record. She was like “what’s a record?” so I had to go into the long explanation and described to her what a record was. She really couldn’t believe we use to listen to music on these over size discs. Now I feel even older… thanks Lexy.

With the way the mortgage melt down is happening it’s putting many families into debt. Families are turning to there credit cards to help bail them out. What they really need is some debt relief for the situation. Using credit cards can help you get by in tough situations but may hurt your credit and put you further into debt in the long run. Keep in mind that 30% of your credit score is based off of your revolving debt and when you tend to carry more than 50% of your credit limit it looks like you are stretching yourself to thin, which lowers your credit score.

If you look in the right places you can often get 0% APR credit cards or even go through a professional company that can do the credit card consolidation thing. Companies that offer the 0% APR are Discover Card, Capital One, Washing Mutual and Chase. It’s important no matter what route you go you ensure to fully understand the conditions and what will happen. On most of the 0% APR credit card offers if you happen to miss or are late on a payment the 0% APR goes away. The credit card debt reduction companies all have rules they must go by as well so it’s important to look into them.

The federal government has some great tips on how to protect yourself.
Be wary of credit counseling organizations that:

-charge high up-front or monthly fees for enrolling in credit counseling or a DMP.

-pressure you to make “voluntary contributions,” another name for fees.

-won’t send you free information about the services they provide without requiring you to provide personal financial information, such as credit card account numbers, and balances.

-try to enroll you in a DMP without spending time reviewing your financial situation.

-offer to enroll you in a DMP without teaching you budgeting and money management skills.

-demand that you make payments into a DMP before your creditors have accepted you into the program